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September 30, 2006
Torture in the US (II)
It is interesting to compare the coverage so far of the US's torture bill in Gazeta Wyborcza with that of those radical firebrands at the New York Times. GW (page 7, today) says it's a key law in the fight against terrorism (this presented as fact, not as Bush's or Cheney's position), whose purpose is to "limit the application by special services of such methods as waterboarding." Bush, GW goes on, compromised on his original position, agreeing to the law's direct invocation of the Geneva Convention. From now on, those fearless defenders of human rights at GW point out, prisoners will have access to nearly all the evidence against them. Nearly all - and not a trace of irony.
Here's the NYT's verdict: "a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts." The editorial is reproduced in full at Common Dreams.
Posted by hgrodsk at 09:02 PM | Comments (0)
September 29, 2006
Bad
Judging by word of mouth (and not the increasingly obviously phoney bestseller lists bookshops put up by the door to clear out old stock), Leopold Tyrmand's Z?y (Bad) is the most popular Polish book I know of. Everyone loves this story of a superhero in the grey days of Polish communism. It's a good few hundred pages but so many people can't be wrong, so I picked it up and started to read. It started off alright. I was only slightly put off by Tyrmand's habit of labelling everyone by the kind of clothes they wear. It's a very Varsovian book and I assumed he was trying to give a flavour of the times: the fashions and the clothes, but also the accents, the moustaches. But as the characters multiplied it all started to get frustrating. This guy wearing the houndstooth jacket - is he the one with the luxuriant moustache or is that the man with the too-short trousers? And is Agnieszka the girl we met at the beginning who was wearing a beret? What happened to the man in the fake leather jacket? Is he going to be in the book again? Oh, here he is - or is that someone else, also wearing a fake leather jacket? Finally, I realised what was wrong. Tyrmand was trying to write the book like you would make a film. Crowd scenes work okay in films. You can introduce fifty people in the first scene and yes, the viewer does single them out by means of visual clues - the checked cap, the green boots, the fact that the camera lingers on one to the near exclusion of the rest. It either doesn't work that way in books or my imagination is not plastic enough to keep track of ciphers like "black boots" and "red face." Z?y went the same way as War and Peace, abandoned after the 76th physical description of a possibly insignificant character in chapter one.
Posted by hgrodsk at 04:15 PM | Comments (2)
September 27, 2006
Radio Zzzzz....
Military coups in Thailand, rioting in Budapest and here in Poland a government falling apart and apparently bribing opposition members to join them. The main opposition party wants to take to the streets... Where will it end? The prospects are grim indeed. This is only a young state - just seventeen years - and some of the things we in established democracies of the west take for granted are still fragile blossoms. And the evidence in Poland is certainly of regress. After all, this is a country which rates "Words" by F.R. David highly enough to bear constant repetition on the trendiest, most youth-oriented national radio stations there are.
It never ceases to amaze me how unspeakably bad Polish commercial radio is, even though its awfulness stems directly from its repetitiveness. Here I am, not a wet day back in the country, and already I have heard Roxette. Roxette! Now correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't Roxette explicitly banned in the preamble to the Nice Treaty, of which Poland is a signatory? ("Nice or Death," they said at the time.) And who died and made Annie Lennox's "Dibi dibi dum dum" a classic? As I sat in the hurtling death trap of a minibus, subjected to the unfolding horror, the waves of crud just kept on crashing around my ears. You hit the bottom of the barrel and then, three and a half minutes later, you hit the real bottom, and then, three and a half minutes later, you hit the real bottom, and then, three and a half minutes later... it's the double pantload himself: MC Hammer, "You can't touch this." Not with a bargepole, not with a bargepole. And I don't even have a radio.
Posted by hgrodsk at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)
Drink, Immigration, Debt, Gadgets and Politics
If we are to believe today's super serious and responsible Dziennik the European Union is soon to forbid drinking at night. That's what the headline on page one says anyway but if you read on it turns out that you will be allowed to drink at night. It's just they plan to make it harder to buy, advertise and distribute alcohol. That would make for a dull headline, though, so "Unia nie pozwoli pi? noc?" it was. The merriment continues on page 12, with a photograph of some yoof at a rock concert. In the foreground, leaning over a barrier, are six young people holding seven plastic glasses full of beer. From what I remember of open air rock festivals, the chances of all six of your mates having a full glass of beer at the same time are minimal. It's not like buying a round of drinks in a pub. From what I remember, you understand. The caption underneath the picture boldly draws the obvious conclusion from the alcoholic profusion: "Young people at last year's rock festival in Jarocin were unable to listen to the music without alcohol." Quick, quick: someone inform an aural doctor.
If Dziennik wants to be taken seriously as a rival to Gazeta Wyborcza they'll really have to do something about their self-righteous tabloidian headlines. "Immigrants flood Malta," says one. The subhead reads "Residents of the Mediterranean Island do not want arrivals from Africa as neighbours and are appealing for help to the EU." I don't know how racist Maltans are but there's a good chance that what many of them object to is not African neighbours per se but huge numbers of immigrants. Scant evidence (the presence of racist graffiti does not prove all Maltans are racists) is presented in the article that this is not the case.
Another scare headline on page 18: "We are Paying for the National Debt." Well, who else would pay for it? Page 23: "E-book Market Revives." In fact, this article is about a new product launched by an electronics company. No evidence is presented to show that people are, in fact, reviving their interest in reading print off a small screen for hours at a time. Lastly on page 24, there is an unintentionally (?) ironic headline: "Has Politics Bored Poles?" It is followed by four full pages of politics.
Posted by hgrodsk at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2006
From TKN to TKM
Over the last few days Gazeta Wyborcza has been running an excellent series devoted to Komitet Obrony Robotników (Workers' Defence Committee), to mark the thirtieth anniversary of this, the first open opposition movement in the Soviet bloc and the forerunner of the Solidarity movement. Authors include well known opposition figures and people still prominent in Polish public life such as Seweryn Blumsztajn, Konrad Bieli?ski, Bronis?aw Wildstein, Ró?a Wo?niakowska Thun, W?adys?aw Bartoszewski, Zbigniew Bujak and Lech Wa??sa. You might expect these tales of late seventies communist Poland to be ones of oppression, depression and repression but no -- the most striking thing about the series is the sense of euphoria (Piotr Wierzbicki) felt by the participants in this then tiny movement. Blumsztajn, editor of the illegal and uncensored Biuletyn Informacyjny writes:
Never again did I have a greater sense of safety. I knew that every one of the people I worked with would replace me if I were put away and would go to jail in my defence. That was the most important principle of the movement.Wildstein, a founder of Studencki Komitet Solidarno?ciowy (Student Solidarity Committee) says that Cracow felt free - in the late 1970s! In nearly all of the accounts the late Jacek Kuro?'s name recurs. Zbigniew Bujak tells of his surprise in learning that a simple working man like himself had only to ring Kuro?. Eugeniusz Smolar, then a journalist with the BBC, describes Kuro? ringing him and dictating to him reports on the repression of opposition figures in Poland. Maciej Kuro? describes beating off the heavy squad from a lecture given by his father in their home: "TKN" stands for Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych (Society for Academic Courses), an organisation dedicated to teaching all comers without conforming to communist dictates. W?adys?aw Bartoszewski was arrested for delivering a lecture in a private flat which he had delivered the week before at KUL (the Catholic University of Lublin), the only "free" university in the eastern bloc. No doubt there is a certain amount of romanticisation in these reminiscences of the past. (It has been claimed that the nostalgia felt by some for communist Poland is in fact a nostalgia for lost youth.) But if you have locked arms to repel a baton charge it will all ring true. There's no other word for it really: solidarity. Well, maybe comradeship as well.
And now, in 2006, what is left? Now we have "TKM," "teraz kurwa my", which loosely translates as "now it's our fucking turn" (i.e. to get our snouts in the trough). Go to KUL and you will notice it has been renamed. It is now the Catholic University of Lublin John Paul II and its interior is festooned with posters equating homosexuality with mental illness, child abuse and drug abuse and offering to "cure" you of it. The lecturers joke that Wojty?a, who once lectured there, was thrown out because he was too liberal.
Today Bronis?aw Wildstein is a PiS bootboy, who makes none-too veiled threats of suing to journalists impertinent enough to ask him who he works for. Antoni Macierewicz, a leading KOR activist, is now, to put it diplomatically, a divisive figure. The Kaczy?ski brothers - yes they were in this as well - see the round table talks of 1989 (in which they took part) as a sellout to the communists. Ludwik Dorn was also active in the democratic opposition: now look at him congratulating the police for illegally breaking up peaceful demonstrations.
Naturally, the contributors are not unaware of this. Ewa Milewicz recalls the words of Jacek Kleyff, who said that if his persecutor of today were in the future to be persecuted his doors would be open to him. Where is this spirit of trust and brotherhood now? Piotr Wierzbicki writes, in quite a moving piece: "The transformation of Antoni Macierewicz from a Warsaw member of the intelligentsia into a nationalist Catholic telling fairy tales about Masons was a shock to me." Wierzbicki was from 1993 to 2005 editor of Gazeta Polska. The following quote from that paper comes from September 6th 2006, after Wierzbicki's editorship:
The fact of secret service talks [i.e. with Kuro?] would not be so embarassing for Kuro?'s fans if they had resulted in a normal democratic country. As it is, there is something less than normality [...] We don't know the exact decisions reached in the talks between the secret service and Kuro? and his political friends. This is precisely what this politician's modern day defenders are most ashamed of.The posthumous smearing of Jacek Kuro? is perhaps the hardest thing of all to take. So he had talks with the communists? We can only guess how many lives that saved in the - as it turned out - peaceful handover of power. The British for many bloody years refused to talk to what they regarded as a terrorist organisation in Northern Ireland. When they finally did, the killing abated. Leszek Ko?akowski is worth quoting at some length:
Today the Polish Round Table and its participants are frequently slandered and reviled, often by people who didn't lift a finger if it meant bringing themselves to the attention of the Polish People's Republic authorities. They know that getting involved in talks with the communist government was a crime, that the affair should have been settled entirely differently. How? This they don't say. Should an uprising have been started, bringing the country to its feet? If so, why didn't they rise up? Who was stopping them? We don't know. But we do know the terrible conditions and the immense difficulties the first government, of Mazowiecki, Balcerowicz, Skubiszewski and Kuro?, worked in while putting the country on a new track. They succeeded in the end and for this TP (True Poles) cannot forgive them, claiming they would have done it differently and a hundred times better (we still don't know how though) and without sullying themselves with the negotiations with commies that cause TPs to react with such horror.I leave readers to guess who the "TPs" might be.
Posted by hgrodsk at 03:38 PM | Comments (0)
September 24, 2006
Grammar Attacked
I found this today in the New York Times:
We don’t use future tense, we don’t use passive voice, we don’t have long chapters.(We're not too keen on definite article either.) The speaker is Diane Steele, publisher of the "...for Dummies" guide to stuff. I knew the philistines had it in for the passive voice, but what did the future tense ever do to to rile the plebian hordes?
Posted by hgrodsk at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)
Torture in the US
This weekend's Gazeta Wyborcza has a story headlined "Bush agrees to the Geneva Convention." How good of him to agree to something his legislature signed into law half a century ago. Who would have thought the day would come when the agreement of the US not to torture prisoners would be news? The US! The country to whose values others less fortunate and more oppressed have, perhaps naively, traditionally aspired. The headline is interesting in that it makes it look like Bush made the concession. The subhead reads: "America will firmly forbid the most brutal methods of questioning prisoners suspected of terrorism used up until now and will abide by the Geneva Convention." Another word for someone (prisoner or not) suspected of terrorism is "innocent person." The irony continues: the article describes the three Republicans who refused to support Bush's bill allowing "podtapianie" as rebels (I guess "podtapianie" is the Polish for waterboarding: if you are ever in Vilnius you can visit the place where communists practised their variety of waterboarding on "terrorist suspects"). And finally, some criticism of the "rebels": "Voters will remember how divided the Republicans are. We're going to lose out over this." This quote comes from an unnamed Republican advisor - unnamed, presumably, because of the depths of cynicism and amorality it shows.
Posted by hgrodsk at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2006
Zdzis?aw Beksi?ski
It must be great to be an artist. You get to puncture pretentious ideas about art and literature and no one has any come back because you're the one doing the art, not just talking about it. Here is Beksi?ski in conversation with Henryk Brzozowski:
I'm sure you know all those cliches people have been writing about Beethoven for years. That in the Fifth and the Appassionata you can hear the knocking of fate on the door... If it's knocking, it must be an anthropomorphic fate: it's wearing a jacket, knocking with the right hand while holding in the left hand its hat, which it took off so it wouldn't disturb him while he was listening to the music and knocking at the right moments and in time.
Zna Pan na pewno te wszystkie komuna?y, które od lat wypisuje si? o muzyce Beethovena. ?e w Pi?tej i Appassionacie s?ycha? pukanie losu do drzwi... Je?eli puka, to chyba jest to los antropomorficzny: nosi marynark?, praw? rek? puka, a w lewej trzyma kapelusz, który zdj??, by mu nie przeszkadza? przy sluchaniu muzyki i pukaniu w odpowiednich momentach i do taktu.
Some of Beksi?ski's art: here.
(Later:)
It turns out I can put pictures on this page after all... This is Beksi?ski:
Posted by hgrodsk at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2006
Andrzej Warcho?
Andrzej Lepper, leader of Samoobrona, a farmers' party, has left the coalition government. Primesident Kaczy?ski accused him of warcholstwo - brawling, troublemaking. In response, Lepper called this accusation "chamstwo," which might be translated as "boorishness" but has also been translated on occasion as "assholeishness." Although "warcho?" (troublemaker) may seem innocuous enough, the word has interesting connotations in Polish. Back in 1968 first secretary Gomu?ka used it to describe political enemies of the communist state - Jews in particular, in another shameful anti-semitic episode of recent Polish history. So perhaps Lepper was right when he accused Kaczy?ski of a "lack of political and personal culture." If this is not "insulting a functionary of the state" I don't know what is, so perhaps Lepper's lawyers will find themselves gainfully employed in the near future.
Posted by hgrodsk at 09:47 PM | Comments (2)
September 21, 2006
Business as usual
Yes, it's good to be back in Poland, where pedestrians are inexorably being pushed off the streets by people handing out leaflets (schools, loans) to pedestrians.
Turning, inevitably, to the papers, I find one intriguing story amongst the usual mire of vituperation and sleaze. Ludwik Dorn, deputy prime minister and minister for the interior, flew into a snot and walked out of a TV programme when at the last minute it turned out that he would be appearing with one Roman Giertych. Dorn criticised the journalist harshly, saying she was not fit to run the show, and threatened that his party would boycott the programme. According to one of the tabloids he even demanded her resignation.
Those of you fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with Polish politics may be wondering who this Roman Giertych is that excites such emotional responses from Minister Dorn. Allow me: Giertych is the minister for education in the same government which Dorn also serves. He is a coalition "partner." Doubtless Dorn regularly storms out of cabinet meetings, accusing the prime minister of being unfit to run the show, when Giertych turns up unannounced.
Posted by hgrodsk at 01:06 PM | Comments (0)
September 01, 2006
Summer
As you might have guessed from the long gaps between posts, I am on holidays -- holidays in dial-up land, also known as Ireland. Here, without links or diacritics, are some random observations:
As the number of Poles in Ireland continues to rise, journalists continue to make no attempt whatever to spell their names right. A helpful Pole will tell a gullible Irish journalist that his name is "Martin" and so into the paper of record goes "Martin" instead of the interviewee's real name: "Marcin." Journalists seem unfamiliar with the idea of writing down names and checking them. So the Irish Times wrote last week about "Magdalena Sobezak." It should be "Sobczak," as thirty seconds using Google would have shown. In fact, Google even suggests the right spelling for you. It is all too evident that print journalists use the internet to write their stories. Could they not use it to check spellings? Or better yet, get the spellings right first time?
Irish bread is still inedible. A Polish bakery has been established in Dublin.
The University of Limerick is looking for a Research Centre Administrator on a salary of €45,000. Too bad if you are merely an academic: the salary for a junior lecturer in politics there starts at €39,911. There's better money for top gun big brains to be made in University College Dublin: they're looking for a professor of geography and offering from €105,927 to €136,299. The president of
UCD is behaving like an English football club manager, which is great news for the David Beckhams of the academic world but a little less exciting for the lower third of staff in UCD who are denied pension rights because they are on fixed contracts. I wish the new professor of geography two thirds of the best luck.
Staying with matters academic: on a visit to Trinity College Dublin's library I was met by new automatic doors. And I do mean "met." They do not slide across; they open out -- towards you as you walk in.
Thursday's Irish Times reports Primesident Lechoslaw Kaczynski saying that there is no anti-gay bias in Poland. It's all a media myth. (It's funny how the media everywhere in the right-wing, capitalist, neo-liberal, free-market west is implacably left-leaning, at least according to those who are most right-wing, capitalist, neo-liberal and pro free-market. And yet it's the lefties who are accused of being conspiracy theorists.) Kaczynski is quoted as saying "In Poland, there are homosexuals who take very high [political] positions." Who could he have in mind?
Since I am now outside the jurisdiction of Poland I can say that both Kaczynskis are *********, ******** ********** without being arrested and questioned. No, wait a minute: they're trying to sue a German newspaper for breaking Polish anti-free speech laws. Maybe I'll go back and delete the above.*
The Kaczynskis could learn something from the example of Zachary Guiles, a US student who won in court the right to wear a tee-shirt that is critical of his president, George W Bush. God Bless America!
New civil service offices built outside Dublin in a move to decentralise the administration of this sprawling nation have been found to have a few "snags." 400 pages of snags, to be more precise. The company that won the tender to build the offices turned in a bid that was far lower than that of any of its rivals. The result is numerous breaches of fire safety regulations and offices whose light switches are in the corridor. If this were Poland everyone would assume that a bribe had been paid. But this is Ireland, so it was probably greed and incompetence.
The minister of state for housing has come out against housing speculators. He thinks they should be taxed out of existence. So far so Big-Government good but here's where the greed and incompetence come in: the minister said that such people should be "playing the commodities market in the London stock exchange on oil or cocoa beans or whatever..." See? It's perfectly okay to "play" with the livelihoods of impoverished south American cocoa farmers but not with the houses of first world property owners.
*Duly deleted. I am back in Poland.
Posted by hgrodsk at 11:57 AM | Comments (2)